On his debut solo album, London-based Gavin Ellis, formerly of the Corrections/the Fallout Trust, aims to pair the sonic stylings of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips with accessible melodies. But the magic of both those bands was the wild weirdness beneath the beauty. Here the self-consciously pallid prettiness of the woozy indie guitars, synths and heartbreak fits more with the recent wave of fakeadelic music for those who don’t like things to get too strange. There are good tracks: the shifting, racing guitars on the initially dreamy opener Modern Spring and the tight thrum of the rushy The Closest Thing to Heaven, but mostly this is tame, decorous stuff.
